Blu-ray Review: “Betty Blue (37°2 le matin)”

Posted by staticblog

on May 12, 2011M at 10:54 am

Rating: 88

Now a 25-year-old exponent of cinema du look, the artful renegade film movement that also spawned Luc Besson’s “La Femme Nikita,” Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Betty Blue (37°2 le matin)” was Beineix’s follow-up to “Diva” and an intensely beautiful tragic romance. It is almost impossible to imagine any other actress as the luscious but unhinged Betty: With her bee-stung lips and transfixing range of expression, Beatrice Dalle seemed born to play Betty — perhaps too much so.

Betty lives with Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a handyman in charge of painting beach shacks along the French coast. Zorg is also a frustrated writer, and when Betty discovers his spiral-bound novel, her manic side takes over. “Betty Blue” is all about the dark side of what film critic Nathan Rabin calls the “manic pixie dream girl” — Betty is disarmingly beautiful and brings a kind of dangerous excitement to Zorg’s life, but the same things in Betty’s brain chemistry that make her wonderful will also betray her.

Here is Dalle’s audition reel intercut with a recent interview. Francophone abilities might be helpful, but really it’s the visuals that show why Dalle won the role.

In 1986, Dalle was the toast of French cinema, but her own eccentricities and brushes with the law undid a promising career. After Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth,” the next 20 years of freak roles and drug busts were more than a little dispiriting for “Betty Blue” fans. This Blu-ray edition offers a beautiful digital restoration of the film’s original theatrical cut and look back at Beineix’s glory days, but on the downside, this is the 115 minute theatrical version. True fans of the film will want the full three-hour director’s cut, which is still available on DVD, but there is no timetable for such a Blu-ray release. Considering how difficult it was to find a U.S. release of any kind for much of the past decade, this “Betty Blue” will do until then.

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